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Poetry

Within You and Without You

by Robert Frazier

We are born with 270 individual bones
We die with 60 less
This is not a human quandary

45 thousand millennia of development
From fish to forensic reconstructions
Your skeleton is just hard hard tissue
Able to be stripped down and
Reabsorbed by osteoclasts
Yet able to rebuild from harsh damage
This too lacks mystery

But bone marrow forms red blood
To truck oxygen along
The 9 zillion freeways of the flesh
So why do we worship the heart muscle
Why do we romanticize it
It only pumps platelets and cells
And when love breaks the heart
There is no power to heal the damage
Only a gloomy jukebox lament
Plus the salve of time

Featured Poet of the Month Robert Frazier

My father taught cryptography for Army Security after working with Turing’s bombe at Bletchley Park during WWII. My mother was an oil painter who studied with Emile Albert Gruppé in Rockport. The science of deciphering gibberish into plain text somehow meshes with impressionistic imagery in my writing. I live on Nantucket Island with my wife, Karol Lindquist, a nationally recognized basketmaker, while my daughter, Timalyne, was a graduate of Clarion West in 1995 (I was at Clarion ‘80). I am the author of nine books of poetry, and a three-time winner of the Rhysling Award. I have published over one hundred poems in Asimov’s.

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